Donald Sultan: The Theater of the Object - Tapa dura

Donald Sultan rose to prominence in the electrified atmosphere of New Yorks downtown art renaissance of the 1980s. At a time when the use of graffiti, crockery and post-modern figuration was filling gallery walls, Sultans simple iconography and complex technique provided a thought-provoking and elegant respite. Today, Sultan remains fascinated by fruits and vegetables, but has expanded his visual repertoire to include Chinese hanging lamps, plum branches and other talismans of traditional Asian art, transformed, lacquered and highly distinctive. Donald Sultan is the first book to provide comprehensive attention to the artists distinguished thirty-year career. In 1987, Sultan told Barbara Rose that his mission as an artist was to haul painting into the 21st century. Now, nearly a decade into the century, it is a perfect moment to review his progress. Through the years, Sultan has become a master printmaker as well as a painter and draftsman, and the book contains examples of each medium organized by subject matter, offering fascinating comparisons of the impact of method on image.

Carter Ratcliff is a leading art critic and contributing editor to Art in America. He received the College Art Association’s 1987 Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two Art Critics Grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Poets Foundation Grant. John Ravenal is Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.